Belarus Leader Lashes Out at the West, a Year After Crushing Protests

MINSK, Belarus — President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the brutal and erratic ruler of Belarus, summoned his acolytes, docile members of the media and a few independent journalists on Monday to present his version of reality: The tens of thousands of Belarusians who rose up in mass protests against his disputed re-election last year were a clueless minority, he said, manipulated by the insidious West seeking to cleave his country from Russia.

He insisted that his actions were not only justified, but had actually preserved world peace.

“Today, Belarus is the center of attention of the whole world,” he proclaimed in the course of an eight-hour news conference in his vast, marble-floored Palace of Independence. “If we had shown weakness during the protests,” he asserted, it would have precipitated a new world war.

While Mr. Lukashenko has worked hard to support his view of events, it is widely dismissed as nonsense by Belarusian activists, Western governments and independent analysts. In fact, they say, after blatantly stealing the election he ordered his law enforcement agencies to crack down on protesters using violence unseen in Europe for decades.

Since then, he has driven hundreds of opposition leaders and others into exile, scrambled a fighter jet to force down a commercial plane carrying an opposition activist, and silenced independent media outlets by jailing entire newsrooms. He has paid several visits to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, seeking financial help to buoy his country’s sanctions-stricken economy.

On Monday, a year after the most serious challenge to his rule, Mr. Lukashenko struck a defiant tone, receiving rapturous applause from most people in the audience as he held forth without taking a single break. Outside the palace, walls were decorated with photos of him with foreign dignitaries, and one displayed personal photos from his youth.

Mr. Lukashenko lashed out at the few Western journalists who asked questions about the allegations that his regime is torturing its opponents and repressing civil society.

“There were no repressions and there will be no repressions in the future because I do not need that, it would be like shooting myself in the head,” he said. His assertion contradicts findings by the United Nations; a Belarusian human rights organization, Viasna; and other watchdogs.

He acknowledged that a prison in Minsk’s main detention center was “not a resort” as he had referred to it earlier in his address, but he denied allegations of torture, resorting instead to whataboutism.

“Why have you killed a girl in Congress?” he asked a journalist from CNN, referring to the death of Ashli Babbitt, the woman shot by a police officer as she and other rioters raided the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. After that, Mr. Lukashenko said, “a question about repressions against civil society from my part just can’t be compared to the situation in your country.”

He also belittled the Belarusian Olympic athlete Kristina Timanovksaya, who last week fled to Poland after openly criticizing her coaches for registering her in a race she had not trained for.

“Who is she?” he asked, trying to diminish her record as a sprinter.

Members of Mr. Lukashenko’s cabinet, pro-government bloggers and mostly friendly journalists from the region frequently interjected to show their support, to thank their president and to push back at the few critical questions from other journalists.

Mr. Lukashenko has been living in his own, imagined world “for many years,” said Artyom Shraibman, an independent Belarusian analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center, who watched the marathon speech from Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. He had fled Belarus, fearing he would be arrested there. Mr. Shraibman said some members of the audience intervened after uncomfortable or challenging questions “to convince Lukashenko that the majority in the room is on his side.”

Those few questions, like one about the economic price of suppressing the largest-scale protest Belarus has seen since independence from the Soviet Union, seemed to throw Mr. Lukashenko off balance.

“You can choke on your sanctions,” he said, referring to additional penalties imposed by Britain and the United States on Monday against him and his allies.

“We didn’t know what this ‘Britain’ was for 1,000 years, and we don’t want to know it now,” he said. “You are American lap dogs!”

The U.S. Treasury Department on Monday added 27 individuals and 17 entities to the list of those under sanctions, which drain the country’s export revenues. Last month, President Biden met with Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, Belarus’s unlikely opposition leader, who was forced to flee the country shortly after claiming victory in the presidential election.

Over the years, Mr. Lukashenko has performed a balancing act with his foreign policy, playing the West off against Russia in an effort to preserve his independence while extracting economic succor from both. But Mr. Putin’s support during the protests — including a veiled threat to intervene militarily if necessary — was a critical lifeline for Mr. Lukashenko. Western sanctions have been pushing Mr. Lukashenko even closer to Mr. Putin.

But during the news conference, billed as “the big conversation with the president,” Mr. Lukashenko portrayed Russia and Mr. Putin as more dependent on Belarus than vice versa. He asserted that Belarus, which borders Poland and the Baltic States, both NATO members, is Russia’s last bulwark against the West.

Following that line of argument, he insisted that the protests against him last year were caused by Western countries seeking to attack “the heart of Russia” by fomenting unrest in Belarus.

“Together with the Russian president, we immediately realized what they wanted from us,” he said.

Today, his protestations notwithstanding, Mr. Lukashenko’s rule hangs on his personal relationship with Mr. Putin, said Katia Glod, an analyst with the Center for European Policy Analysis. At any moment, Mr. Putin can “make some other decision,” regarding the Belarus leader, she said, for instance “push him toward a referendum” on a new constitution and resignation.

While allowing during the news conference that Belarus is in talks with Russia on another $1 billion loan, Mr. Lukashenko insisted that his country would remain independent and never merge with Russia.

Mr. Lukashenko has little leverage against the West. But he has been accused by the European Union of retaliating for its sanctions by trying to foment another immigration crisis in Europe when he allowed 4,000 migrants to cross into Lithuania this year, compared with 81 in 2020.

“You put us under economic pressure, why should we protect you?” he asked, referring to the E.U.’s measures, which include a ban on commercial flights to Belarus.

“If your planes do not fly to our country, some other planes will come,” he said. “And if planes from Afghanistan come, we will also accept them,” he added, referring to the increasing exodus from that country as the Taliban gain control of increasing territory.

At the end of the news conference, Mr. Lukashenko issued a warning to the few Western journalists who were admitted to the event.

“If you bring this war to us, we will have to respond,” he said. “But in this case our community, our society, is united. You can’t break us.”

At that, nearly the entire audience rose in a rousing ovation.